[Iran Press TV] America's policy has been clear, keep Israel flanked with phony "Islamist" states, shackled by corrupt governments, fully penetrated by a military that is fully integrated with Israel and making all the right noises meant to maintain sectarian divides across the Islamic world.

The wars Israel never fought

Not only was the 1973 war fought by American planes, and American pilots, carefully repainted to seem "Israeli" but the majority of sorties flown during the 1967 war were also American pilots flying American planes

Who could blame them. Recent revelations, documents "leaked" which put history in real perspective now show that, not only was the 1973 war fought by American planes, and American pilots, carefully repainted to seem "Israeli" but the majority of sorties flown during the 1967 war were also American pilots flying American planes.

When America calls Israel its "aircraft carrier in the Middle East," it isn't kidding. The only thing that has changed is that America used to actually use Israel to attack others.

A plan is afoot

Now, Israel uses America. We are seeing it in Syria, we saw it in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are seeing it in Turkey and, we are now told, we will see the war "re-expand" to Iraq, then to Armenia and points beyond.

A plan is afoot, Israel, America and Turkey.

America is involved in a multi-faceted plan to maintain regional hegemony across the Caspian Basin. To do so, it is necessary for it to destabilize the current government in Iraq, bring about the collapse of Syria, destabilize and collapse Armenia and build Azerbaijan as the Israeli/American outpost against Iran and to help support drug trafficking from a continued occupation of Afghanistan.

Azerbaijan has long been chosen to be the new strategic "American aircraft carrier" in Central Asia, not just another layover stop for drug pilots as it has been for the past ten years.

The UN, designed to fail

Key to the process is the avoidance of any durable settlement of any kind in the Middle East. This means that Washington has "green lighted" Israel's settlements in the West Bank, despite UN, EU and even ICC condemnations as being inexorable.

The permanent "toothless" United Nations...the Oyster Bay money pit..., crippled by a Security Council, which was, at one time, actually subject to veto by the island of Formosa (Republic of China), is not just a sign of anachronism but one of permanent colonial overlordship.

US policy is not just dependent on settlements but continued bombardment of the civilian population of Gazoo and by permanent political upheaval in Egypt as well. ... and continues in this vein for another couple pages. High density vitriol at its best.

#3
If you're going to post a story behind a paywall, you might consider including a snippet that justifies the payment.
Sorry Dan, didn't realize, just post the headline in Google, you should get straight through.
Excellent article from a pointy head.

Sally Amis, whom the author has described as "pathologically promiscuous", died aged 46 after periods of depression and alcoholism. Her brother believes that the structure of Islam might have saved her life. "She was such an uncontrollable girl that there was even talk of her joining the army when she was 17 or 18 because we all sensed that she needed a really tight structure, an ésprit de corps of shared belief," he told The National. "Islam in its way gives you that, a collectivity that she could have been a part of, which incidentally forbade alcohol and premarital sex. She might have had a chance. She would have had to embrace it earlier than she embraced Catholicism.

Modern Britain might have been the expected focus of conversation with Martin Amis following the publication of his latest novel, "Lionel Asbo." After all, the book comes with the subtitle "State of England," and the state of the place, in his eyes, rather differs from the country on glorious display during the Summer Olympics and, months before that, in the queen's Diamond Jubilee. The England in Mr. Amis's withering portrait is a cultural dystopia where an irredeemable thug is catapulted to national prominence after winning the lottery. Thus does modern Britain reward lethal criminality and proud ignorance with unearned riches.

But when Mr. Amis, one of the most celebrated and pilloried British novelists of recent decades, sits for an interview in his Brooklyn brownstonehe is a recent émigré from the land he so relishes anatomizingthe buzz about all things British has long faded in the news, supplanted by the autumn miseries of the Middle East. After the Arab Spring washed through the region, he says, "I was talking to my younger son. He speaks Arabic." A hint of paternal pride passes over his face. "He's about to do a third degreethe first one was history at Oxford, the second one was on the Muslim Brotherhood. He's lived in Jordan as well as in Egypt.

"I said to him, it seems like Islamism doesn't look like a ubiquitous threat anymore. But he said, 'Ah, their hour will come. They're in government now. That's what's happened now. Some clever people have realized you can't stay out of the system.' "

Is Mr. Amis skeptical now of the "clever people" emerging from the shadows of the Arab Spring?

"Well," he says, looking lost in thought. "There's Tunisia"where a moderate government is establishing itself"but it does seem the weight of the past is enormous. Egypt is 4,500 years old. It's unbelievably ancient. And Egypt has never had democracy. Would that you could, with a snap of the finger say, 'This is better,' and everyone agrees it is better. But it's going to be difficult."

He continues: "We gave a dinner party. We had Israeli friends overeveryone at the dinner table except my wife and I was called Cohen. And a right-wing Israeliwho is very right-winghe said, 'I don't think they're ready for democracy.' And a guest at the table said, 'I find that very offensive.' When people say thatthat they're offendedthey're not really arguing with their head. They're arguing with the blood. But I yearn for the people of the Middle East to benefit. I yearn for it."

Readers who have followed Mr. Amis's career will recall the infamous "race row," as the newspapers called it, between the author and Terry Eagleton, a Marxist English professor at the University of Manchester.

In August 2006, the British police foiled a plot to detonate explosives on 10 trans-Atlantic planes. A short time later, Mr. Amis said to an interviewer: "There's a definite urgedon't you have it?to say, 'The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.' What sort of suffering? Not let them travel. Deportation, further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East and Pakistan. . . . Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children."

For a writer given to nuances, this was a striking statement. The comment went largely unremarked until Mr. Eagleton alighted upon it and denounced Mr. Amis.

The professor accused him of recommending "punitive measures against all Muslims, guilty or innocent." Mr. Amis responded by insisting that the remarks were not "advocating anything." They were, he said, "a thought experiment," only "conversationally describing an urgean urge that soon wore off."

In a letter to a Muslim columnist who had accused him of being "with the beasts," Mr. Amis argued that "the extremists, for now, have the monopoly of violence, intimidation, and self-righteousness." But, he said, "I don't want to strip-search you . . . or do anything else that would trouble or even momentarily surprise your dignity, or that of any other irenic Muslim."

Reflecting on the episode half a dozen years later, he has a simpler explanation: "I said something stupid. I was in a rage."

But then he crosses his legs, and with the change of position offers an explanation that sounds suspiciously like a justification. "But to contextualize itto use a Terry Eagleton kind of wordit was the day the plot to blow up 10 airlines was exposed. The next day, the lady journalist came from London"to interview him in the Hamptons on New York's Long Islandand "on the flight that day, the lady journalist told me, you weren't allowed to take books. I was demoralized. I was thinking: We're going to lose this. It seemed to be such a terrible symbolic victory . . . to deprive trans-Atlantic passengers of reading for a long flight." He pauses. "I thought only one book, the holy book, is winning."

In "The Second Plane," a collection of nonfiction published in 2008, Mr. Amis noted that he is an "Islamismophobe," not an Islamophobe. The events of Sept. 11 left him bereft and angry and in desperate search of distinctions. "Let us make the position clear," he wrote in an essay titled "Terror and Boredom." "We can begin by saying, not only that we respect Muhammad, but that no serious person could fail to respect Muhammad. . . . But we do not respect Muhammad Atta."

Nowadays, in the wake of the change that has convulsed the Middle East, Mr. Amis sees, cautiously, much promise for the secular and moderate and religious Middle Eastern men and women who yearn for change as they weigh the Islamists' promise of welfare and economic growth. "In most ways, Islamism has quickly become political rather than terroristic. But how is it done? We all want it. What matters to me, in my own life, is not prosperity beyond a certain point. It's freedom of speech. Democracies can't work without that. It takes all my powers of empathy to imagine what it must feel like to not be able to say what you think. It's a huge hurdle."

The mention of freedom of speech brings to mind how the late Christopher Hitchens rushed in to defend his friend when the debate with Mr. Eagleton erupted in 2006. "The harshness Amis was canvassing was not in the least a recommendation," Hitchens wrote, "but rather an experiment in the limits of permissible thought."

Though Mr. Amis says that he moved to the U.S. early this year for family reasonshis wife, Isabel Fonseca, is an American, and they have two teenage daughtersthe impulse to make the move from Britain had come two years earlier, after "Hitch" fell ill with esophageal cancer. "When he was diagnosed, that's when we started talking about coming here. He might have lived another five or 10 years." Hitchens died in December last year.

Mr. Amis had watched with fascination the arc of Hitchens's career after he moved to the U.S. in the early 1980s. How did Mr. Amis account for his friend's success as that rare character in the modern world, a public intellectual? "British journalists are more forthright, and disrespectful, in a good way," he says. "And Hitch was an old Trotskyist at heart. So that made him a bit fierce. Writers were always subliminally valued because America was uncertain about what it was and these writers would help tell America what it was. But it would also define them and give them nationhood." He laughs: "You don't need to tell an Englishman who he is."

Then again, even though Mr. Amis stayed behind in Britain, he was every bit as fascinated by America as his friend had been. Mr. Amis's first wife, Antonia Phillips, is an American, and his most celebrated novel, "Money" (1984), is set in New York. His literary hero: an American, Saul Bellow, who was also something of a father figure. Mr. Amis had a complex and not entirely satisfactory relationship with his own father, writer Kingsley Amis, who was none too encouraging of his son's decision to follow him into the writing game.

The game has changed dramatically in the time since Mr. Amis joined the family business in 1973 with "The Rachel Papers," his debut novel. "There's definitely pressure on the novel. It's to do with the world speeding up. What a lyric poem does is stop the clockthings aren't going to move forwardbut the novel has adapted to that. I'm much more conscious now of the fact that the arrow of development has to be sharper. The static novel is dead."

What fiction does he read, in these straitened days for literature? "I read my friends[Ian] McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman"Rushdie. Among younger novelists, only Will Self and Zadie Smith pop up. "But otherwise, I read people who are all dead. There's only one value judgment in literature: time. If someone has been read for 50 years, then they're probably very . . . rewarding. You can't say that about the latest sensation by a 28-year-oldI was once that," he says, and folds his arms, smiling.

To be precise, he "was once that" 35 years ago. Now Mr. Amis is at an age, 63, when biographers start to take a writer's measure, as with Richard Bradford's "Martin Amis: The Biography," published in the U.S. a few weeks ago. Mr. Amis is hardly ready to follow Philip Roth's recent lead and retire from writing fiction, but he is reflective about his career.

"When you're coming to an end, you don't take any comfort in your achievements. What matters is how it went with women and how it went with children. That's what becomes important," he says. "The terrible symmetry is that men don't tend to blame themselvesit's always someone else's fault. And women tend to blame themselves. But, then, at the very end, it's the men who start blaming themselves and the women stop blaming themselves. And that's why they're happier."

'Lionel Asbo" does not seem to be the work of a happy man, even if Mr. Amis does clearly take a perverse pleasure in delineating the horrors of modern Britain. Was he watching the Olympics this summer, with their presentation of a bright and shiny alternate British reality?

"Following it, but not watching," he says. The family was in the countryside during the summer. The Games looked "pretty marvelous," he says, "but I'm ashamed to say I was defeated by the TV we had. When my daughters were around, they could get it going. But then they left. And I couldn't switch on the TV."

Ms. Sethi, a former assistant books editor at the Journal, is a writer living in Pakistan.

Killing thousands of Americans didn't convince the left to turn against Arab Islamic terrorism, maybe something more serious like racism will do it?

"Racism is one of the main factors that motivate many young Africans from non-Arab to defect and resume their normal lives in their country of origin.

...One of the main jihadist have defected in terrorist groups in the Sahel due to racism was Hisham Bilal. Bilal was the only Black commanding a brigade in the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), the group that controls the city of Gao.

He left the movement in early November and returned to Niger, the country of origin. In an interview with AFP in Niamey at the time, he spoke about racism in the ranks of jihadist groups in Mali.

"These fools of MUJAO are not children of God, they are drug traffickers. They are all that is contrary to Islam, and for them, a Black man is less than an Arab or a white man," he had said.

This is a serious subject and if Islamic terrorists fail to take immediate action they risk losing the support of the left which could impact the number of pro bono lawyers available to them and the number of media columnists willing to write flattering profiles of them and urge an immediate surrender by Israel and America to their demands.

Diversity training is the first step. Every terrorist cell must have a member who is responsible for diversity enhancement to create a terrorist group that is as diverse as the world.

Sensitivity training is also important. The Muslim world is rather racist, but there are acceptable and unacceptable forms of racism. Anti-Jewish racism is acceptable because Jews generally do not join Al Qaeda. However if Al Qaeda wants to fully tap into African Islamic terrorist groups it will need to be more open.

America has a black man in the White House. Why not have a black man as the next leader of Al Qaeda? That will properly impress the left.

[Dawn] Repeated and unending investigations, indifferent lawyers, a chaotic judicial system and a government that really didn't care have all ensured that Benazir Bhutto... 11th Prime Minister of Pakistain in two non-consecutive terms from 1988 until 1990 and 1993 until 1996. She was the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founder of the Pakistain People's Party, who was murdered at the instigation of General Ayub Khan. She was murdered in her turn by person or persons unknown while campaigning in late 2007. Suspects include, to note just a few, Baitullah Mehsud, General Pervez Musharraf, the ISI, al-Qaeda in Pakistain, and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who shows remarkably little curiosity about who done her in... murder trial is going nowhere.

Five different judges have headed the trial and the prosecution has filed eight separate challans since the proceeding started on February 29, 2008, which have also added to the delay as have the investigations by two different investigation teams.
Continued on Page 49

[Dawn] THE post-death conspiracy is no less painful. Everyone has chipped in to ensure that the killers of Benazir Bhutto... 11th Prime Minister of Pakistain in two non-consecutive terms from 1988 until 1990 and 1993 until 1996. She was the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founder of the Pakistain People's Party, who was murdered at the instigation of General Ayub Khan. She was murdered in her turn by person or persons unknown while campaigning in late 2007. Suspects include, to note just a few, Baitullah Mehsud, General Pervez Musharraf, the ISI, al-Qaeda in Pakistain, and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who shows remarkably little curiosity about who done her in... have remained practically untried five years after her liquidation. The government has juggled with challans and suspects. No less than five trial judges have heard the case. Defence lawyers have been too busy in other work and their cause has been helped by the prosecution itself seeking adjournments. Amid all this, the PPP government has been subjected to criticism over its inability to deliver on its promise of bringing Ms Bhutto's murderers to justice. Its efforts to find the killers have certainly been sluggish. The party's current minders have been too keen promoting the grand ideal of democracy to focus fully on the murder case. Instead, the party has been exploring the political mileage to be gained from the contrast between not trying Ms Bhutto's murderers and a 'trial of her grave' -- a reference to the reopening of the Swiss cases.

In his speech on the fifth death anniversary of Ms Bhutto, PPP chairman Bilawal Baby Bhutto Zardari
Continued on Page 49

An explosion in southern Lebanon last week destroyed what is believed to have been a Hezbollah weapons depot. This latest in a series of mysterious "accidents" in Hezbollah-controlled precincts proved, as one Israeli official wryly remarked, that those who "sleep with rockets and amass large stockpiles of weapons are in a very unsafe place." With the Party of God's overland supply route through Syria choked off by the 22-month-long uprising against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and Israel virtually in total control of the maritime route, Hezbollah's stockpile is being systematically degraded.

Yet the arsenal of Iran's other regional proxy force, Hamas, is growing. The Israeli Defense Forces' campaign against Hamas last month in Gaza targeted Iranian missiles, including the Fajr-5, capable of reaching Tel Aviv and other points north, and destroyed most of them within the first hours of the conflict. But Hamas is already rearming, and it's not clear that Israel or even Muslim Brotherhood-governed Egypt, which is ostensibly capable of controlling the Sinai tunnel networks through which Hamas receives its arms, can do much about it.

Israel's next war with Hamas -- a further confrontation is almost inevitable -- may well feature not only Iranian missiles smuggled through Sudan, but NATO-quality small arms and shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles that come by way of Hamas's most recent weapons supplier, post-Qaddafi Libya.

Israel's Operation Pillar of Defense also zeroed in on Hamas commanders, most notably Ahmed al-Jabari, Hamas's chief of staff, responsible for the group's military operations. It was Jabari who replaced Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, assassinated in a Dubai hotel room almost three years ago in an operation usually attributed to Israel. In a sense, then, Pillar of Defense began back in January 2010 in that most profligate of the United Arab Emirates -- which is also a veritable weapons bazaar.

#1
Iran is unlikely to do anything as per the KSA-led GCC States unless SHTF between State-specific Govts + local Shias - it needs Lebanon + Syria [Morsi Egypt?], however, for both non-Suez strategic access to the eastern Med as well defense agz incoming US CVBGS + EBGS in that front. Iran already has soon-to-be-Talibanized BFF Nuke-armed Pakistan to oppose the USN, etc. coming in the eastern Indian Ocean.

Unless Moud + Tehran Boyz do something royally stupid, this leaves China-vs-Japan/ASEAN as the higher priority threat for the Bammer = USA after January 1st, 2013. A CHINA-VS-JAPAN SHOOTING WAR IN NE ASIA IS LIKELY TO QUICKLY EXPAND THROUGHOUT EAST ASIA + HIMALAYAS AS CHINA ATTEMPTS TO FORCIBLY + PERMANENTLY RESOLVE SEVERAL BORDER + STRATEGIC ACCESS ISSUES AT ROUGHLY THE SAME TIME.

A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.

Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.

Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.